The standard eBay messaging system works well for small-time sellers: you receive messages in your My eBay inbox and get a notification at your email address. That’s fine if you receive four or five messages a day. But what if you get dozens or even hundreds, and you need something better—something more like an eBay CRM?

How to Create an Advanced eBay Messaging System

"Guys, I think it might be time to upgrade."

You might want a better system for any of several reasons. Maybe you:

Get a lot of the same questions from customers and want a quick way to send time-saving canned responses.

Have a customer service team and want to let them reply to your customers without handing over your eBay login details.

Want to be able to answer your eBay messages from the same place where you answer messages from Amazon and your own website.

Whatever the case, there are two different customer service platforms that you can use to create this kind of advanced eBay system: Zendesk and Desk.com. Both offer extremely competitive pricing—Desk.com’s Starter Plan (hidden off to the side here) costs just $3 per month. They also both offer free trials.

These guys make customer support way faster and easier. We decided to use Zendesk to manage our own eBay messages. As soon as we started, Zendesk improved our ability to offer great customer service so much that we immediately saw our eBay feedback score rise.

However, there is a catch: neither Zendesk nor Desk.com can integrate with eBay by default. The eBay messaging API is just too frustrating for them to work with.

The best you can do with a vanilla account is set up forwarding for your eBay email notifications. All this is good for is telling you it’s time to log in to your eBay account to send a reply—making it little better than a message in a bottle.

Connecting My eBay Messages to Desk.com or Zendesk

Now you can receive and reply to eBay messages from within Desk.com or Zendesk. All you need is ChannelReply.

ChannelReply integrates the eBay messaging API directly into your customer service software, transforming it into a true eBay CRM. No longer will you need to log in to My eBay and slog through message after message. You’ll be able to deliver lightning-fast customer service with a suite of team and message management tools.

This system isn’t limited to eBay. As the icing on the cake, you can also use it to manage customer service for other marketplaces and websites from the same screen.

Interested? Learn more or contact us with any questions, or dive right in and start your free trial. Why spend another day dealing with the default eBay messaging system when you can use the most powerful customer service tools in the industry?

"ChannelReply has allowed us to increase the productivity of
our customer service department by consolidating the messaging
from multiple marketplaces directly into Zendesk. As with most
retail businesses, we sell on multiple online channels.
Streamlining customer interactions from these marketplaces
has been crucial to both our customers' experience and our growth.
ChannelReply has done a wonderful job in developing and supporting
this functionality."

JC Webster

COO, Chicago Music Exchange

"ChannelReply has allowed us to integrate multiple eBay and Amazon accounts
into Zendesk creating accountability and making it easy to scale our marketplace
customer service. Without ChannelReply it would be unmanageable to provide the
level of satisfaction our customers expect out of Golfio.
The integration with the eBay and Amazon messaging API is tight and we
couldn't be happier!"

Howard Choi

Business Dev Manager Golfio

"Given the various standards of service that apply, managing multiple marketplace
channels is a challenge to any organization. ChannelReply has given us the ability
to organize our inquries to maximize turnaround and increase our efficiency when
handling our marketplace requests. We look forward to additional features ChannelReply is offering that will only increase our ability to service our customers
across channels."